Thomas Cannon

​Thomas Cannon's humorous novel The Tao of Apathy is available on Amazon. His poems and short stories have been published in many print and electronic journals. Each year he is part of the planning committee for the Lakefly Writers Conference and is a member of the Wisconsin Writer's Association.

The Doctor Visit (March 17, 2017) Walter Anderson sat in the chair closest to the nurse as she asked his wife questions and took his blood pressure. He was thirty years old, allergic to penicillin, but not currently on any medications. His blood pressure was borderline. Walter should keep an eye on it. He was five foot seven and the nurse had weighed him at one eighty-five. Pudgy, but compact and sturdy looking. The nurse observed that he combed his hair forward to disguise a receding hairline. Then she charted that his scar along his jaw was at maturation phase and that his right hand was still in a cast. His wife Sara looked to be slightly older. She was thin with blonde hair pulled tight into a ponytail. The nurse judged her to be about the same height as Walter, but loomed over him as she sat straight in her chair. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” the nurse said gathering Walter’s file up and walking out. “Shortly my eye,” Sara said. As the door was shutting, she turned to Walter. “You are not going back to work yet. Let those offices go without cleaning.” Walter took the top magazine off the small pile on the desk and pushed his glasses up by their bridge. It was Redbook, but he knew that if there was a non-woman’s magazine in the pile, it would just be Sports Illustrated. He flipped through the pages looking for the article from the front cover, “Feel in the Mood for Sex.” “This is enough,” Sarah said. “We are not leaving without a referral for that speech pathologist he mentioned.” Doctor Wegner knocked, came in, and then dropped Walter’s file on the desk while flipping it open. He shook both their hands. “Sarah. How are you doing, Walter?” Walter gave a smile. He glanced at Walter, then Sarah. “Any changes?” “No,” Sarah answered. “I could have just told your nurse that over the phone instead of making us pay for another appointment.” As Wegner stood leafing through the papers of Walter’s file, Sarah judged his handsomeness. She approved of his strong, clean hands and his fresh haircut with its clean delineation between his hairline and his smooth neck. Still looking at the file, Wegner said, “Walter, I’ll have you hop onto the table so that I can take a look. I just took another look at the results of your CT.” He felt Walter’s neck for swelling and then took a tongue depressor and his light and looked down his throat. The doctor shook his head because everything was normal just as it was for Walter’s last examination. “There are no signs of stroke or head trauma to suggest aphasia. Walter is able to make gestures immediately to questions, so we know he understands speech. Sarah, there is nothing to suggest Walter’s loss of speech is physical.” “That you can see, Doctor,” she said, making direct eye contact. “But you are just a general practitioner. We want that specialist.” Dr. Wegner tapped his chin. “I don’t have a problem making the referral for the speech pathologist. That’s the next step. But at the same time, I think Walter should see a psychologist. He did not have any trauma to the head. There is no apparent injury to his larynx or his pharynx. Yet he cannot talk.” “I know that.” Sarah rested her hand on her hip. She started to say something, hesitated, and then said it. “But my husband is not crazy.” “I did not say he was.” Doctor Wegner absent-mindedly felt Walter’s throat a second time. Then the doctor took a step over to the desk and pulled out a small pad of paper that had the logo of a drug company on it. Walter had been studying a poster of the central nervous system and the doctor had to hold the pad in front of Walter to get his attention. “Walter, we should have done this two months ago, but I couldn’t figure out why you had not naturally done it.” He drew a pen out of the pocket of his lab coat and Walter reached up with his left hand and collected the pen and the paper. “You have been unable to talk for months now, and yet you do not carry a pen and paper with you. All you have given me is head gestures or one word sentences written on the margins of brochures.” Wegner reached for Walter’s file and picked out a brochure with words written all over it. “Dr. Wegner, we don’t need the list of things you don’t understand.” Sarah was trying to keep herself in check with him being a doctor. Unfortunately, he was not cooperating. “All we want from you is the referral for a doctor that knows what he’s doing.” Walter took the pen and paper and held them. He held them just as the doctor handed them to him for a while, then set the pad on his knee and wrote, I ACCEPT THAT NOONE WILL HEAR MY VOICE. Then he handed the pad of paper back to the doctor. The doctor read the note and handed it to the wife. Then he looked directly at Walter. “I have consulted a friend who is a psychiatric consultant. I didn’t mention your name. I kept it confidential, but I asked him some questions about you.” The doctor sat down on his stool and rubbed his clean-shaven chin with the palm of his hand. “And he suggested I give Walter the pad of paper, but maybe to save some writing that I could have his wife describe his life. Sarah lets try this and I want you to be honest with me. Walter’s illness has me stumped and I don’t like to be stumped. If this is not productive, I’ll apologize and write the referral for you.” Sarah looked at Walter’s sentence. It made her look over to her husband who was staring at her. “He hates his job.” She kept her voice low as she could hear the voices of the nurse and an elderly man talking in the next room. She looked over at the doctor who had always just rushed in and then out for their visits, but now looked unhurried and attentive. “When we got married, he had his own janitorial company, but now he is just a lowly night janitor at an office building. He could head that department, but he has been so much as told that they won’t promote him because they need someone at night that actually works. But who doesn’t hate their job?” “Yes, I suppose.” Doctor Wegner pulled out a second pad from the desk and wrote, “Undervalued at work.” “Which he brought that on himself. He should have worked smarter to keep his business.” Sarah gestured with her hand as she spoke, putting her hand up then as if telling Wegner to stop. “But the real problem is that he keeps everything all bottled up. He lost his dad last year, and every time I try to talk about it, he ends up telling me to drop the subject. But that doesn’t make somebody stop talking. I’ve had worse things happen to me. He just has the usual problems that everyone else goes through, but I am sure you and your psychiatrist friend would blow them all out of proportion.” The doctor didn’t write anything down. He waited for her. “How so?” “I hope that’s the last time I hear ‘How so?’ out of your mouth.” Her face flushed and she had to wait for a moment to go on as she had. “There is nothing else to tell. We have a good life. Yes, with its ups and downs, but who doesn’t? We even separated a few months back. But we worked it out. Actually, he was coming home when the accident happened. This is so dumb. When he got into his car he could talk and after the accident he couldn’t.” Doctor Wegner wrote “DAD” and then “WIFE--” He kept his eyes down to ask what he didn’t want to ask. “What caused you and Walter to separate? My friend said that his home life might have the biggest impact on his loss of speech.” “My husband is a simple man, Doctor. There was no big reason. You men run at the first sign that things aren’t going your way. That’s all it was and like I said, we had worked things out. We-had-things-worked-out.” “Sarah, please,” he said to me. “Just leave me alone. Please.” I remember the morning sun was beaming bright and hot through the window. Walter had just shoved his breakfast plate away from him. All I told him then was that he looked stupid with the cigarette in his mouth, which he did. “Yes,” he said back. So I had to ask him what he meant by that. Walter looked at his plate coated with egg yoke and toast crumbs from where he had sopped up the yoke with the last bite of his toast. He snapped the cigarette to his lips and took a quick puff. Then he went, “Yes, I’m back smoking.” I told him I knew he would start again. After that, Walter took his plate to the sink and rinsed it. He emptied his pockets of his keys, wallet and change and put them on the windowsill above the sink where he always does. He stood looking out the window until he turned to look at me and said, “I am not weak.” “Then quit smoking,” I told him. I slapped the table with the newspaper because I knew he was going to put it on me like he always does. Walter looked at me for a moment longer, and then just went upstairs to bed. When he heard me get into her car and leave for work, he must have packed his suitcase and left. I still get this mental picture of him slipping his keys and wallet from that windowsill and leaving.

“Walter would tell you the same thing. He knows he’s got no willpower. And I really don’t think that’s a reason to try and end a marriage either. I freaked out when I came home and I didn’t know where he was. I thought something terrible had happened to him until I got a voice mail message from his brother that Walter was staying with him for a while.” “He never communicated anything to you, personally? Not even a note?” “Right. And I was worried because he had been doing some weird things lately. Do you want me to go on? I know the HMO only allows you fifteen minutes for each patient.” “Just go on, Sara. Was he acting stressed out? I know when I work a lot of on-calls; I get moody. Everything irritates me and I drive my wife nuts. I go around rearranging things and start cleaning out closets.” “Dr. Wegner. You don’t know anything about Walter’s kind of stress. It’s stressful for him to not be the main provider and to have debts from a failed business.” “Sarah, I’ve had to work very hard.” “So have we. But you’re above our kind of stress. It’s not like we can afford to drive a Lexus.” “How do you know I have a-” “Lexus? Don’t you remember bumping into us in the parking lot of the mall? I didn’t think you actually recognized us.” The doctor fluffed his hair with his fingers. “We’ve gotten off on a tangent.” “You’re the one that started talking about your home life.” The doctor looked down at his notepad. “So, what things was he doing that was out of the ordinary?” “Walter, wouldn’t you say some of the things you did were odd?” Doctor Wegner snapped his head up, realizing that he hadn’t bothered to try and communicate with his patient further. Walter shrugged his shoulders.

A few weeks before he left, I came home early and found him staring in the mirror on my dresser. He was looking at himself in a pair of bib overalls. I saw the big orange FleetFarm bag, so I knew he had been out when he should have been getting his sleep. He was so en-tranced in looking at himself; he didn’t notice me in the doorway. “Well, farmer Walter,” I finally said to get his attention. He sat down on the bed and leaned forward to hide my view of the bibs like a kid caught looking for his Christmas presents. “Are you going to go feed the pigs?” I had to laugh. He was so embarrassed, but I was just kidding him. “Don’t.” he said. Then he told me the only reason he got them because his dad wore them. “When he was farming,” I said, then. He was being so defensive, I had to goad him. But he went on about how it didn’t seem to be his dad in the casket because he had on a suit. I began to think he was obsessed with his dad and these overalls. He said, “Even after church, he would slip off his slacks and put a pair on over his dress shirt and tie.” “Come on, Walter,” I told him. “Don’t remember your dad for something so silly.” “I don’t know how to remember him,” Walter said looking again to the mirror as he sat there. “I don’t know if I should think about the good things or some of the bad memories.” “The good ones,” I told him. “The man was gruff, but now he’s gone. What sense is there in reliving things that have passed?” I shook my head. “You’re cracking up, I think. I come home early to get ready for my doctor’s appointment and I find you in a state and dressed like a sharecropper.” Then he started over-reacting. “I’m sick of your little jabs at me,” he said. So I told him, “You don’t like the way I tell you like it is, but you’re mad at your dad, not me. You need to forget about the bad times. OK?” I got out my change of clothes and took them to the bathroom to take a shower. He went to the spare bedroom. I found him buried under the covers when I checked on him before leaving for my appointment. I was a little angry that he had messed up the spare bed. After all, I work too. But I went over to kiss him good-bye, and he didn’t respond. So I tried to find out what was wrong and I asked him why he was so distant to me. He looked sad as he turned over, but kissed me good-bye.

“Odd things like that, Doctor. I guess he was acting strange before the accident. Because of his dad. Even while separated, he would do these weird things. We’d be discussing things on the phone, then I would hear a clunk and it would be that Walter had thrown the receiver down.” “That does sound significant.” “Only because you don’t want to be wrong.” Sara breathed hard. “That’s how you can make the connection. You are keeping sick people waiting, so that you can somehow prove your point. You don’t want to consider that he didn’t get a moment’s peace living in his brother’s house with all his kids. I think the stress of sleeping on someone’s couch and his throwing away his marriage wore him down to the point of getting in an accident, but he was coming home to me.” The doctor avoided her gaze and nothing was said. Sitting up on the examination table, Walter stared at the doctor’s thinning spot on the back of his head. “You had worked things out?” “Yes,” Sarah said, feeling for a moment that she had finally convinced the doctor. “The very same day he hit the truck. That’s how I know his loss of speech is not your psychogenic aphonia. It wasn’t a bad day at all. I had called him at his brother’s house and we talked for a long time. He was driving home so that we could talk about how I was going to change things for him.” Walter jumped down from the table, making his wife and the doctor look at him. The doctor looked at Walter, hoping he would answer the next question. “How did he want things to change?” “That’s what I asked him,” Sara answered pointing at the doctor. “But he wouldn’t pinpoint one thing. He just told me things needed to change. I said, ‘what do you want me to do differently? Who do you want me to be?” I was emotional at the time because he seemed to be saying that I was a bad person. I asked him, 'Why don’t you love me the way that I am?” Sarah looked to the door as if planning an escape route. “You know, he didn’t say anything for a while. And he never actually told me what was the matter with him, but finally, he said, ‘I love you. For who you are. Don’t worry about it being that. Don’t cry.’ That’s how I know I am not the cause of his not speaking.” Sarah and Doctor Wegner heard Walter begin to write. In silence they waited, until he handed his note to his wife. Sarah read the note and looked to Walter. When the doctor reached out his hand, she handed him the note. He read the note and handed it back to her. “You thought so all along.” Wegner tried not to think of his other patients that his nurse had waiting in the other exam rooms. Tomorrow and every day after that, he would be just as rushed. He chose not to think of anything else, but of Walter and Sarah inside their anger. In what he said next, there was tenderness in his voice.

copyright 2017

VIRTUAL FRIEND (June 6, 2014)

I’m sure you’ve heard the comparisons between me and Walt Disney. And of course, the comparisons between Mickey Mouse and my Kippy. By the time the Time cover came out with Kippy standing on my shoulder, I had read up on Mr. Disney. Like Disney I created a lovable character and was able to make some innovations in animation. But I didn’t set out to change things. I guess at first Disney was poor and had some failings in his dream to be a cartoonist. I was just a computer programmer who saw beauty in the structure and intuitiveness of program design and developed computer games in my free time. Which after my wife left me; I had a lot of it. Of course, she said I spent too much time playing on the computer, but it had been my hobby since I first learned C++. I did not watch sports or go out to the bars. I was faithful to her. I was just doing something I enjoyed. At least it was just for fun during our marriage. After Connie left, it became something I had to do to fill the lonely nights. Loneliness was the key to my success, I can see now. To keep myself busy, I tried to create one of those shoot ‘em up games, but my heart was not really in it. I found myself wanting something uplifting. Like a pet. I had always wanted a dog, but it just wasn’t logical to have an animal that consumed your time with walking and bathrooming and such. So I created Kippy, my animated golden retriever. At first, she was a simple avatar using the typical computer rendering of only 12 frames per second. I won’t bore you with the technical aspects of what I did as it has been well covered in Doctor Dobb’s Journal. But with nothing but time and obsession for perfection, I developed my own program until I made it so that you could see Kippy’s shiny coat shimmer. After spending the day dealing with office politics and my wife’s lawyers, Kippy would be there on my computer screen with a happy face and wagging tail. After two years, I made it so that Kippy responded to verbal directions and could infer what I needed from her by detecting my mood through my word choice. I did truly become obsessed, but I advanced her to the point that when I needed cheering up she would run around and do tricks. When I just needed a companion and someone to listen, Kippy would look out the screen at me and perk up her ears. The rest of the world didn’t make sense. At work, it was all whining and backbiting while our company slowly ran its course. Connie, if you thought about it, was not thinking too logically either. She left me to avoid a bad situation, but we were going through a worse one. Our marriage had ended, but she kept fighting everything in the divorce. If she wanted to leave, then leave. Don’t hang around and keep kicking me. Figuratively, I mean, of course. Kippy made sense though. I found myself looking forward to coming home to a face happy to see me. I would watch her do antics for me in the world I created for her. The game I created based on Kippy, although I think of it as more than a game, was my way of sharing the one good thing I had. The company I worked for went bankrupt, but that enabled me to devote the next two years and more money than I had developing my virtual utopia. And once Virtual Pet Land hit the net, it spread like a virus. People loved it and I did make it to appeal to everyone. People could pick any animal they desired and customize it to make it their perfect pet. Again though, they were not your typical animated creatures. Each one had a distinctive sound and look with expressions. On your birthday, these friends barked, meowed, oinked, tweeted, or even sang the “Happy Birthday to You” song to you. For holidays, they would decorate the environment you selected for them. Like Kippy, they would interpret how you were feeling and give what you needed whether it was cheering up or someone who loved you that was willing to listen. Which as my success bears out, is the only two things you really need. Kittens were a popular choice, but people could select whatever they wanted. Dogs, cows, pigs, whatever. Even snakes. Lots of people thought they could be funny and pick dangerous animals, but these animals would be adorable and sweet. If someone tried to mess around with the game by abusing or neglecting the animals, it would be automatically detected and the creature would be whisked away and taken to one of our virtual animal shelters before anything could happen. The animals could not be changed once created, but the animal shelters were popular because it was the only way people could get a second Virtual Pet Land pet. The adoptive parents enjoyed getting to know the personalities of the adopted creatures. I say creatures because fish people could select fish. They’d have an online fish tank, but these fish would still interact with facial expressions and were trainable to do tricks. Many science fiction fans chose an alien. They could create their alien creature (non-hostile) and the world to put them in. These beings were subject to the same guidelines, but very few people tried to mess things up. Instead, people created tribute web pages for their online friends and had photo albums of them doing tricks or just looking cute. Many people even included their Virtual Pet Land pets in their wills. I was soon very rich. My ex-wife was very not. I had big houses, fast cars, and top of the line computers. I dated models and actresses who were impressed with my money. Maybe that was why I still felt bitter. But I don’t think so. They were dating me because of the money, but I was dating them for their looks. At the time, I considered them equitable relationships. Yet, there was just some sort of sadness eating at me that even Kippy could not abate. You are supposed to feel better when you give and I gave people my dream, I gave them peace and happiness, but I did not get it in return. With everything I had, it was not logical that I would still be miserable, but I was. I became more miserable when everyone turned on me. They could not see that the natural progression of the game was good. I saw how Walt Disney’s dream became corrupted to the point where they use their television network to get children hooked on their products. Just like my marriage became corrupted. I was only being pragmatic, not sadistic like they said. I gave people time so that over a billion people around the world could enjoy their pets, but then their pets had to start dying. Some got cancer and some got into accidents. Some simply began to get more feeble and then passed of old age, but they had to die. Nothing should be immortal. Otherwise, these animals would become like my marriage and my job and become something you resent. People took leave of absences from work to mourn their pets’ death. Marriages ended and prescriptions for depression went up. A few people even committed suicide. People tried to have me arrested or went to court to get an injunction to have me stopped. I was soon to find out why. Oh, God, it hurts even to say it, but I should have expected it. I put Kippy into her own world in my online game. She was very old compared to the other characters and once I flipped the aging switch, she developed severe arthritis. Kippy moved so slow, and seemed to be in pain. A few times, I tried to put her to sleep, but I could not do it. Finally, Kippy, my one true friend, died in her sleep.

***

Then I understood the anguish my customers were going through. I returned to the computer program to restore the game to an earlier time where all the creatures were still alive. I worked feverishly for six months to break my own program until I came across a video I took of Kippy greeting me our first Christmas morning together. In Kippy’s world it was never cold and never rained. It was just sunny and lush, but that Christmas morning, it snowed. Kippy ran and hopped through drifts and bit into the snow. It was then that I realized that Kippy would not approve of me working long hours all alone again. I switched my computer off. I walked away. I wanted the happiness Kippy gave me. But I felt that I would let her down somehow if I did not find it in the real world. After selling my houses and giving most of my possessions away, I came to realize that I had been bitter when I added the dying code to Natural Land, but also that I was right. Everything needs a point of obsolescence. I would like to tell you how people came to see that, but most have not. I am a reviled person. There are computer programmers trying to hack or recreate my program so that the pets do not die, and I believe they will succeed for a while. But I’m convinced that there will be some sort of bug to keep things changing. In a way, Kippy lives on. They have created a Kippy morning cartoon and she is on everything from bedspreads to lunch boxes. I live in a small apartment near a park, where I walk my new puppy I adopted from the real animal shelter. His name is Spot.